Resumo

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by UN Member States in 2015 and are part of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development that aims to tackle global challenges in areas such as health, education, economic security, social justice and environmental issues (Krasodomska et al., 2021). In this line, the 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development presents as a focus to provide an action plan to ensure the sustainability of the planet in the future (Martínez‐Ferrero & García‐Meca, 2020).

(1) To what extent does board independence influence the sustainable development goal disclosure? and (2) To what extent does the CSR committee moderate the board independence - sustainable development goal disclosure nexus?

We use the theories of agency, resource dependence, and stakeholders. Agency theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976) deals with the contractual relationship between principals (shareholders) and agents (managers), agents serve the interests of principals by performing actions on their behalf (Kumala & Siregar, 2020). Resource dependence theory (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) states that firms depend on resources to survive (Shi et al., 2021) and stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984) posits that companies disclose social and environmental information to reduce pressure from their stakeholders (Al-Qahtani

TTo test the hypotheses, we use a sample consisting of 160 firms-year observation of 80 firms from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru in the period 2019-2020. These countries were selected because they belong to the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Emerging Markets Latin America Index, which has 101 constituents and covers approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization of each country (MSCI, 2021). Our data set is made up of information from the Refinitiv database.

We find that the CSR committee positively moderates the relationship between board independence and Sustainable Development Goal disclosure. The results also show that board independence does not influence the disclosure of Sustainable Development Goals and that size positively influences this disclosure.

This study examines the relationship between board independence and Sustainable Development Goal disclosure and the moderating role of the CSR committee. Using data from 80 firms in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru collected over the 2019-20 period, we employ the ordinary least squares method. We measure the disclosure of Sustainable Development Goals through an index made from the ratio of SDGs disclosure to total SDGs. We find that the CSR committee positively moderates the relationship between board independence and Sustainable Development Goal disclosure.

García-Sánchez, I. M., Gomez-Miranda, M.-E., David, F., & Rodríguez-Ariza, L. (2019). The explanatory effect of CSR committee and assurance services on the adoption of the IFC performance standards, as a means of enhancing corporate transparency. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal.